


Some Other Direction to Drive

by summerstorm



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character of Color, Episode Tag, Gen, POV Female Character, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerstorm/pseuds/summerstorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bonnie and Damon track down Isobel. Set after 2x11.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Other Direction to Drive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [softlyforgotten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyforgotten/gifts).



> softlyforgotten, I hope you don't mind that I stole this idea directly from your general TVD post. Thanks to K for beta; title from Tristan Prettyman.

"How did you rope me into this again?" Bonnie asks absently, packing an armful of notebooks into the back of the car. They're probably not going to be of much use, but she likes being able to check if she's not sure of something, and she's not stupid enough to take her grandma's grimoire with her on a road trip with Damon Salvatore. The chances of damage and thievery are higher than Bonnie can comfortably handle.

Damon clicks his tongue. "I didn't," he reminds her. With a flourish, he opens the passenger side door for her. Bonnie knows he overemphasizes the gentleman act with her — even if he didn't, it'd result in Bonnie rolling her eyes all the same — but he's not much better when he doesn't exaggerate. Bonnie has no idea how he's kept up the façade so long without anyone finding out. "Elena did. You're our one and only backup GPS."

"I could have drawn you a map instead of coming along," Bonnie comments, getting in.

"And Stefan probably wanted someone to police me or something, I don't know. I mean, what could I possibly get up to?" Damon says easily, and smiles in that really creepy way of his before walking around to his seat, knuckles arrhythmically knocking on the hood of the car. "Also, leverage," he says as he slips into the pilot seat.

"Elena didn't say anything about leverage," Bonnie tells Damon, calm. "I hope you don't have blackmail in mind already."

"I always have blackmail in mind." He thrusts the key into the ignition. "But I'm not that defeatist."

Bonnie breathes out an unsurprised laugh. "Because that's exactly what I'm worried about," she says, and leans back in her seat, shaking her head lightly.

*

The house Alaric's investigation — investigation meaning calling up a student of Isobel's who unexpectedly now knew where she was — leads them to is a suburban home, modest, the sort of place someone for whom blending in is a survival tool would pick out.

"This can't be it," Damon says before they're even out of the car.

Bonnie hates that he's right, but it can't be. It's not a bogus address; when they break in, the place is empty, but there's opened mail addressed to a _Ms. Flemming_ on a table by the door, and Bonnie can feel her presence in a way she can't really explain when she touches a shirt left behind on a chair in the master bedroom, like she hasn't been gone long. It also looks like she wasn't here long, either.

Damon is downstairs, rummaging through the living room, and even though she should expect something like it, Bonnie still jumps when she hears a loud crashing noise coming from beneath the floor.

"Relax, she's not dead," he says when she makes her way down there. There's a woman lying unconscious on the smashed-out coffee table.

"Get her off the glass," she says, bending over to hold up her back and legs. She tilts her head up for him to help out, and he gives her a long-suffering look, but acquiesces, and then starts going through her stuff.

"Keep looking," Damon says. "I want to know if Isobel's really been here."

"I thought we were going under the assumption that she'd been here."

"She may have been," Damon says, looking back and up at Bonnie, "but you can never rule out trap."

"Don't you trust Alaric?" Bonnie asks. She wants to go for biting, but she's actually kind of curious. Her voice does come out a little colder when she adds, "I thought you guys were like _besties_ now."

Damon looks at her like he can't understand how she's survived this long, which, whatever, and then he says breezily, "I don't trust anyone." There's a moment of silence. "Besides," he says, going back to fishing in the woman's bag and coat pockets, "I believe he believed that girl just fine. I just don't have the highest opinion of his judgment."

Scanning the living room for papers and the like is easy in that there aren't many, or that much furniture. There's a drafting table in the corner with a folder on it, and inside there are a few documents—contracts, detailed descriptions, a floor plan. "She's a realtor," Bonnie tells Damon.

It would be natural to call the whole enterprise a dead end, but the door to the laundry room is cracked open, and Bonnie sees a hint of red on the tiles.

"Damon," she calls out, and he rises to his feet and steps closer, opening the door further and walking in when nothing happens. "There's blood here. I could use it for a tracking spell."

"How do we know that's Isobel's?"

Bonnie shrugs a fraction, sighs, and says, "We don't."

"I was under the impression that you didn't want to go on a road trip."

"I strongly preferred the drive here, find Isobel, drive back option, yes," Bonnie agrees, "but we'll be on the road as long as we have to." Damon leers at her until she rolls her eyes. "I promised Elena." She waits for him to say something, because it's one of the few points he's occasionally willing to be serious about, and he knows just what it's like to promise Elena something, how little things like not wanting to be stuck in a car with Damon any more than he wants Bonnie to give him a series of aneurysms don't factor in when you promise Elena something.

"Don't look at me like that," he says, and she goes off to the car to find a map she can do a tracking spell with.

*

They stay at a small inn in an even smaller town overnight, because Damon may be a vampire, but Bonnie's not pulling an all-nighter if she doesn't have to. She still has some of Isobel's blood saved in a vial; she can redo the tracking spell in the morning. She's strong enough now.

In the morning, she meets Damon downstairs for breakfast. She feels tense and achy even after she takes a shower in the minuscule bathroom on the floor the receptionist put her on. She misses her bed already.

"Why couldn't Stefan and Elena do this? It was their plan," she whines. She's way past caring about what Damon may think of her; whatever he thinks of her, she thinks worse of him.

"Trouble never sleeps in Mystic Falls," he recites in a bored tone.

Bonnie bites into her French toast and takes a deep breath. "That's surprisingly apt," she says, mostly to herself, "but no. No, they don't have the monopoly on keeping people safe. How do you even trust she won't sneak out with Elijah or something? He could be lying."

"He wouldn't give himself away that fast," Damon says.

"So what could they be doing that's more important than this?"

"Right now?" Damon says, not really a question. "At eleven in the morning on a Monday after _weeks_ apart, well, they should be at school."

"So should I," Bonnie mutters under her breath.

Damon goes on, ignoring her. "Which most likely means they're dry-humping in a library aisle somewhere. Want to bet?"

"Why would you think—"

"I have super hearing," Damon says, smiling scary-sweetly.

"You're not even in the same state, you can't possibly hear anything going on in Mystic Falls from here."

"No," Damon says slowly, like he's talking to a small child, "but I can hear them when I'm _there_ , and trust me, that's remarkably likely."

Bonnie sighs. "Just forget I ever asked."

"What, why ever should I do that? It's a lovely visual."

Bonnie raises her eyebrows. "The one that includes your _brother_?"

He falls silent. He actually falls silent — no snarky remarks, no weird faces, no crazy eyes. She's never, ever in her life seen Damon speechless like this. She didn't even have to use magic. It's probably a horrible thing to think, but she's kind of proud of herself.

It only lasts so long.

He cocks his head after a while — half a minute, maybe; half the time it takes Bonnie to eat a piece of toast — and says, "Sure. I guess." The look on his face isn't shocked; it's _considering_.

She blinks.

"You're picturing me having a threesome with them right now, aren't you?" he mocks her, and ugh, she can't believe she just handed him the upper hand like that.

"You disgust me," she says.

"No, no," he says, sitting back and touching a napkin to his lips, "go ahead. Think about it. I'll watch."

She glares at him. It doesn't seem to change his attitude, so she gives him a tiny, little, insignificant aneurysm. On the one hand, she feels bad, because nobody deserves to have their brain cells messed with like that. On the other hand, she doesn't, because it's Damon.

He doesn't even scream. It can't possibly be that bad.

"You bitch," he says, and she smiles beatifically.

*

The ride to the place Bonnie's tracking spell points at is mostly quiet, calm. She's tired, and he doesn't seem very hyper.

"So what happens when we find Isobel?" Bonnie asks after a while. The silence is a little awkward, but not that uncomfortable. She genuinely wants to know if he has any plans in mind, even if it's unlikely he'll just tell Bonnie before he's discussed it with Stefan and Elena. Still, they're the ones going to find her. She should know what she's in for if he does.

Damon looks like he wants to be an asshole about it, but eventually he looks straight at the road and answers.

*

The house they get to this time is an actual _mansion_ , not enormous but large enough that you can't miss it, with gates and a diamond-shaped pool and the occasional glass wall.

"That's more like it," Damon says in a patronizing tone. It's patronizing towards Isobel, not Bonnie, so Bonnie doesn't answer that one. She kind of agrees with the sentiment, anyway.

Getting in is easy enough. Apparently vampires who own mansions aren't as concerned about their safety as normal people who own mansions. They do have supernatural strength on their side.

They divide the house between them the way they did the suburban home: Bonnie looks through the first floor while Damon stays downstairs.

"She's been here today, she should be back," she says as she makes her way back down. She stops in her tracks when she reaches the last step on the staircase.

He doesn't say the body on the floor isn't dead, but it would be incredibly irritating if he did. It's obvious it is. Bonnie's seen dead vampires before; you can't really _wonder_ if they're still alive.

"Was that really necessary?"

"Yes," Damon says, getting off the floor where he just staked a vampire.

"I could have paralyzed him," Bonnie says.

"But you didn't," says Damon. "Besides, I thought you hated vampires on principle. One more dead vampire, woo hoo," he adds flatly.

The childish, petulant side of Bonnie wants to say, _I don't. I just hate you_ , but she doesn't like that side of herself, so she keeps her mouth shut. It wouldn't even be true, anyway. She does have a certain dislike for vampires in general. A severe dislike, even. The ones she's had the misfortune of meeting have given her good reason to, including her present company. But hate isn't really the right word for Damon, either; she's wary of him. Distrustful. Skeptical. It's not an unfounded, visceral thing.

Okay, it's mostly not a visceral thing. But she can't just forget all the awful things he's done. That would make her just as bad as he is.

"So now we—wait?" she asks, and he shrugs affirmatively. "That's anticlimactic."

"It's not like we were trying to pick a fight, Bonnie," he says in a high, mocking voice. She scowls at him, but her mood softens as they step into the kitchen and sit down.

"Do you trust Elena on this?" Bonnie says after a while. "Her plan? Her deal with Elijah?"

Damon doesn't joke around this time; he doesn't answer immediately, but she can tell by his face he's trying to figure out how to phrase it. It's a nice change of pace, like the calm _after_ the storm.

He shrugs, pressing his lips together, and says, "Do you?"

Bonnie nods in acknowledgment. It's not very reassuring, but at least it's an honest answer.


End file.
